We don’t know what the upshot of the Libor investigations will be, but if nothing else, it has raised awareness of what a fragile international financial system we have. The idea that 16 banks just send a slip of paper to the British Banking Association every day, and that rate becomes a global standard for all sorts of financial products, including $550 trillion in derivatives contracts, borders on the insane. As we’ve seen, that’s just far too easy to game. So one of the potential consequences of the scandal is the scrapping of Libor, and moving to use a different set of benchmark rates.

Central bankers and regulators will hold talks in September on whether the troubled global Libor interest rate can be reformed or whether it is so damaged that the benchmark of borrowing costs should be scrapped.

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King told fellow central bankers in a letter that it was “very clear that radical reforms of the Libor system are needed”.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and global financial regulator Mark Carney, who is also governor of the Bank of Canada, on Wednesday floated possible alternatives to the London interbank offered rate, which some bankers manipulated in the 2007-09 financial crisis.

“There are different alternatives if Libor cannot be fixed,” Carney told a news conference in Ottawa.

Central bankers set interest rates for their jurisdictions. It would not take much to come up with something based on those rates to use as a benchmark. US Treasury bills have even been floated, though I’m not sure that’s a great idea. But there are an array of rates that reflected documented circumstances of what’s getting traded in the market, rather than based on what a banker writes on a piece of paper. The sensible move would be to put Libor out of its misery.

Given your mention in a previous report, David, that something doesn’t smell right about this issue coming forward in an election year (my paraphrase, not your words) can we not also assume that any ‘fix’ will be something the big boys had in mind all along, and that the resulting ‘improvement’ will simply make it easier for them to go on doing what they are doing.

I hope they all get totally tangled in their postelection promises. If I’m not fooled (and I’m a dummie) you can bet the public isn’t.

“I never would have imagined that one day one of the most powerful government officials in the world would be dropping f-bombs on me.”

That’s Neil Barofsky’s response to being on the receiving end of an epic tantrum by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner…

“Neil, I have been the most fucking transparent secretary of the Treasury in this country’s entire fucking history!” Geithner erupted, in an episode that had Barofsky wondering if Geithner was going to “throttle” him. At the time, Barofsky was the special inspector general in charge of oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

It’s one of the juicier episodes in Barofsky’s new book, “Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.” The book recounts Barofsky’s front-row view of how the Bush and Obama administrations handled the bailouts of banks, auto makers and homeowners after the financial crisis.

And no one, that is NO ONE but Timmy made the Banksters reveal so much SHIT! Presumably, LIBOR was SHIT and was not that transparent which makes Little Timmy a LIAR!

“I am not suggesting that the secretary has failed in transparency, I am stating it. Mr. Secretary, you’ve failed to be sufficiently transparent, and that is one of the reasons why people are so angry. But you can still fix it.”

And that’s when the ticking time bomb that was Geithner erupted, says Barofsky:

“‘No one has ever made the banks disclose the type of shit that I made them disclose after the stress tests. No one! And now you’re saying that I haven’t been fucking transparent?’”

What do bankers need LIbor for. They can make up their own numbers for free. The whole system is a scam. For the rest of us, it’s like being forced to play board games with a mentally retarded spoiled child that is allowed to cheat.

I don’t know how society is suppose to function with incompetent crooks running things.

Our government is taken over. They are nothing but a pack of crooks and apparently all it takes to steal America blind is wear a suit and win a fixed election.